REASONS WHY IRAN MUST GO SOLAR

The main purpose of this paper is to stipulate and reiterate the main reasons behind why Iran is one of the best potentials for going solar in the world. We think people in Iran just do not realize how affordable solar has become, how much it can save the country’s valuable resources of oil and gas for next generations and of most important today, how we can save our environment, the most valuable asset we have, from damages and destruction. When we surveyed within educated urban people in capital Tehran which is home to 15% of Iranian total population [1], only one out of ten surveyed people could be convinced to start using solar power at home if solar panel installation and equipment were free. In same survey, findings show that only one out of thousand would use solar at their own cost and expenses, stressing on this fact that the costs have fallen dramatically and solar is less expensive today than it was five years ago. In the west, pioneer countries in deploying solar energy, technical and economical parameters, the main constraints in using solar energy, such as availability of sun as source of energy, consumption of heat and electricity in remote areas and locations, costly access to other source of energy which should be imported, necessity of using clean energies to protect environment from negative impacts of other sources of energy specially hydrocarbon sources and etc. are enough to convince governments and decision makers to convert their current dependence on unsustainable and environmentally not clean resource of energy like fossil fuels to clean and sustainable resource of energy like sun and wind. When looking at these exampled parameters, it is envisaged that Iran has almost all justification in hand to follow the same and decide once for good to implement using clean energies for its sustainable economic development in the country. Technical-wise, Iran is one of the best countries in receiving sun radiation in most of its area in the country. Almost two third of the land is under pure and direct sun radiation and daily available sun is approximately between 8-10 hours. Comparing to western Europe countries like Germany, this average is significantly more and considerable, but in contrast, the implemented solar energy as source of power and electricity in Iran by end of 2012 is limited to 100 MW in total according to official data [2] while the same is nearly 23 GW (23 times more than Iran) in Germany, according to reports [3]. Germany, a strong industrialized country is one of the countries started to use power and electricity for their industry and domestic uses in early stage of electricity invention. Consequently they made all necessary infrastructures such as power plants, networks and grids much earlier than any other country in the world. Sticking to these infrastructures as reasons to avoid solar energy was never on the table of German governments and peoples despite fast development and modernization, but and on the contrary, clean energy is found as one of the main drivers of sustainable clean development and contribution to modernization in the country. This means that if Iran would also make similar decision, the entire power consumption in the code: 1404(Page | 2294) country could be generated from sun and even could be generated for exporting to neighboring countries through existing grids and infrastructures. In this paper strong reasons to allow Iran for immediate going solar are provided.